The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 03

The Alpha King’s Stolen Daughter Chapter 03 — Ember
I made it eight houses before an officer caught me around the shoulders and I screamed something that wasn’t a word.

“MILO—”

“Easy. Easy, kid.”

Two small arms hit my waist.

He was right there. Beanie crooked, breathing fast, alive.

I dropped to my knees on the sidewalk and held him so hard he squeaked.

“What happened?” I pulled back, checking him over. “Are you hurt? Did he touch you?”

“They were fighting,” Milo said, in that flat little voice he uses for things that should make a child cry. “Really loud. Then Dad stabbed her. Then he ran out the back.”

I looked past him.

They were wheeling a stretcher out my front door. The shape under the cloth was too big to be my brother and too still to be alive, and there was a dark stain spreading right where the chest would be.

Marla.

For one ugly second I felt nothing but relief, and I’m not going to lie about it.

Except — it made no sense. There hadn’t even been an argument that morning. And Garrick would never kill Marla. Marla’s paycheck was the only money in that house until my inheritance unlocked. He isn’t the kind of coward who cuts his own throat.

Somebody made him run.

“Are you Ember Lyall Vale?” An officer had crouched down beside me, hat in his hands, using the voice adults use for bad news.

“Yes.”

“Sweetheart, your stepmother is deceased. Your stepfather fled the scene. There’s a warrant out.” He hesitated. “Do you have any other family? Grandparents? An aunt?”

And that’s when the second wave hit, the one that was so much worse than the body on the stretcher.

I’m not eighteen. Milo is seven and sick.

No guardian. No relatives. No money until my birthday.

“Don’t put us in the system,” I said. “Please. Please don’t separate us. He has silver sickness, he needs his doses at six and at nine, nobody’s going to take a seventeen-year-old and a dying kid, they’ll split us—”

“We’ll try to find kin first,” he said gently. “That’s the process. I promise you we’ll try.”

I packed our bags myself. Milo’s medicine went in first, wrapped in a sock. My clothes went in second. Last, from under the mattress, the pink dolphin plush my mother gave me when I was five, that I have hidden from Garrick for eleven years.

They took us to the station and put us in a room with a vending machine and a couch, and Milo fell asleep against my shoulder with his fist in my sleeve.

I stayed awake a long time doing math. Nine hundred dollars in savings. Four months. Two doses a day at thirty-eight dollars each.

The numbers didn’t work. They’ve never worked.

I don’t know when I went under. I only know I woke up with a hand on my arm and I came off that couch swinging, sure it was Garrick, sure he’d come back to finish what he started.

It was an officer. Different one. Older.

“Whoa — hey — you’re safe. You’re safe.” He held his hands up, and something in his face was strange. Not pity. Something closer to fear. “I have news.”

I wiped my eyes. “Foster placement?”

“No.” He swallowed. “We ran your DNA against the federal pack registry. It hit. It hit hard, kid.”

“…What does that mean?”

“It means we found your father.”

The room went very quiet and very far away.

“He’s alive?”

“Very much alive.” The officer’s hand shook slightly as he set down his notepad. “Ember, your father is Lyall Draven.”

He has his eyes. He has his mouth. He has five sons.

“And your brothers,” the officer went on. “You have five older brothers. We contacted the estate ninety minutes ago.” He glanced at the clock like it might bite him. “Their jet lands in twenty minutes. They’re coming to get you tonight.”

I sat down because my legs stopped working.

Seventeen years.

Seventeen years of silver and hunger and a mother who cried in the bathroom, and he was alive the whole time — rich, powerful, king of half a country — and he never came.

Why didn’t he come?

Did he know about me and not want me? Did he only want sons? Did he throw us away?

And under all of it, one thought sharper than the rest, the only one that actually mattered:

They’re not going to let me keep Milo.